


Gleams Which Pass

by tenlittlebullets



Category: Doctor Who, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1980s, Crossover, Drabble Collection, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-28
Updated: 2013-12-04
Packaged: 2017-12-30 19:16:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 2,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1022410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenlittlebullets/pseuds/tenlittlebullets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A collection of whatever Les Mis drabbles, fragments, and shortfic I haven't already posted individually, some of a crossover-y nature.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fairy Tales

Her mother would tell them fairy tales when they were little, some traditional and some stripped-down versions of the romances she immersed herself in. How often had the girls dreamed of being plucked from their mean beginnings (ignoring the servant-child quivering by the ashes of the fire) by a prince, rescued from some imagined peril (they always thought of dragons, never fever or hunger or the stiffness of Cosette’s limbs when she’d been out in the cold too long) by a handsome knight?

Eponine never wondered what Cinderella’s stepsisters felt like when they saw her ride away with her prince.


	2. Alouette

Shortly after the neighbors first began calling Cosette the Lark, Eponine and Azelma found a new game. One day Cosette approached the Thénardiess, trembling and cradling one hand. Her pinky was broken.

“Madame… Ponine and Zelma… I know they were just playing, but it will interfere with my work!”

“Go back to the dishes, brat. Serves you right for annoying them.”

Cosette returned to her work, sobbing. Barely ten minutes had elapsed when Eponine and Azelma skipped downstairs and began to pull her hair viciously, singing with the innocent obliviousness of children playing.

“Alouette, gentille alouette, alouette, je te plumerai!”


	3. She is the very model

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Enjolras pines after his mistress: an exercise in crack pairings that dates to at least seven years before the opening volleys of the Great Enjonine Wank of 2013.

He went to the museum every day to see the painting. In those heady days it seemed that, now the people of Paris knew once again that they could rise up and be victorious, some invisible spirit of patriotism had grasped them by the throat. They regarded their citizen-king with suspicion now. What better symbol for their power than that painting, a constant reminder to Louis-Philippe of who had put him on the throne?

But then things went wrong. The king no longer answered to the people. The painting was taken down, and now Enjolras would see flashes of it—of her—as he walked down the street. In the streetwalkers who accosted him at night, in the tired-faced girls who worked themselves to the bone by day, in the ragged girl who waited outside the café for Pontmercy some nights and sent him simpering, gap-toothed smiles whenever he emerged. He could picture each of them urging the masses on with her bloodstained flag.

He might have fallen in love with that painting a bit. He dreamed, one night, that Liberty kissed him and bit his tongue until it bled. He saw her everywhere.

One night the gamine was waiting outside the Musain as usual. “Was Marius here tonight?” she whispered, tugging at his sleeve.

“Not tonight.” He was about to go on his way when he caught a glimpse of her face, illuminated by a streetlamp, and this time the recognition he saw was more than a flash. “You look… familiar, mademoiselle.”

“Been out here six weeks in a row.”

“Not that.” It was a silly thought, but he asked anyway. “You look like a lady I saw in a painting. Have you ever modeled?”

“Yeah,” she said with a trace of pride, “just once. Some painter grabbed me off the street one day, said he’d pay me to sit for him. No idea why he wanted to paint me, but money’s money. Hell, my little brother came along too. Got to play with a pair of pistols and that was good enough for him. I hear they even put the painting up in some museum somewhere.”

“Perhaps he wanted a woman of the people.”

“Maybe so. Could’ve found a prettier one, couldn’t he?”

“You look just like you do in the painting, mademoiselle. And in the painting you’re beautiful.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This](http://25.media.tumblr.com/43a79482aab6c8d8b306289d0b7da6f2/tumblr_musdg9ZbQC1seeufto1_1280.jpg), of course, is the painting referred to.


	4. Estranged

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A family awaits the return of the prodigal son.

Louise Enjolras has not heard from her brother in three years. He has been arguing with their father almost constantly since he started studying in Paris, but it wasn’t until he finally passed the bar that they had their final falling-out. After that his letters have been infrequent, distant, and always addressed to her alone. Eventually the letters stopped. He refuses any money Papa tries to send him and does not reply to their letters; last year Papa went to Paris himself to talk sense into his son, only to find he had changed addresses. A stranger greeted him at the door.

Papa seems never to tire of calling him an ungrateful anarchist wretch, but when all the portraits with her brother in them disappeared from the house, Louise found them in the back of her father’s closet. There are small tearstains blurring some that weren’t there before.

She keeps his last letter and reads it over and over. It is dated 8 Prairial, Year 40. It is cold and distracted-sounding; he says in it that there will be no more letters, and there haven’t been.

Sometimes she wonders what he is doing with himself, and if he is happy, but any time she says that to Papa he tells her not to ask stupid questions. He says her brother will regain his common sense one of these days and return, begging to be taken back into the family fold. Louise nods and says, “Yes, Papa.”

Privately, though, she admires her brother’s integrity.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 8 Prairial, Year 40 = 27 May, 1832.


	5. Sons of Earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Combeferre has a bad dream, and all wars are civil wars.

All is blackness. It is the middle of the night. He is fighting with someone; he cannot see him in the darkness, but every time he thinks he has dealt his opponent a mortal blow, the man staggers back to his feet and attacks him again. They grapple; he pulls his foe off his feet for a bare moment, and the man gasps in pain. He lifts him up off the ground entirely and the man’s groans grow louder. He must kill or be killed. He wraps his hands around the other’s neck and squeezes.

Just as his opponent grows limp, the first light of dawn streaks the sky. In the faint illumination he can finally see the face of the man he was fighting. It is his own.

Combeferre wakes up with his hands clenched around his rifle and the ringing of the tocsin in his ears.


	6. Crossover #1: The Flame That Never Dies

"You don't even seem to be of this world," Combeferre remarked one day. "You barely sleep or eat, you don't notice everyday life, you won't even take that old pocketwatch in to get fixed. How do you live in our world and never think of anything but your purpose?"

"Because I can hear it," Enjolras answered. "The call to action. You're a doctor, you know the compulsion to fix things. How could I lose my purpose when it's always there, however faint, like a distant drumbeat calling me to war? Maybe one day even my heartbeat will finally match it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Get it? Got it? Good, now try tapping along to 'Do You Hear the People Sing.'


	7. Doctor Who Crossover #2: Untitled

Very few people in Montreuil-sur-Mer saw the Mayor between the time he ordered a carriage and the time he returned from Arras. Of the few who did, the only thing they could all agree on was that in the space of that single night, his dark hair had turned entirely white.

His housekeeper, if you get a few drinks in her, will swear to God Almighty that if the man who returned from Arras had not been wearing the Mayor’s clothes, if he had not addressed her with the same gentle familiarity she knew so well, she would have taken him for a different man. That his hair was white could be put down to the extraordinary strain of that day; that he seemed a few inches shorter could be explained by the stooping of premature age; but the housekeeper, her tongue loosened by the liberal application of brandy, will attest that the very features of his face had changed.

Sister Simplice will reply quietly that since she is under a vow never to tell a lie, she cannot answer such a question, as what she saw with her own eyes was in conflict with what she knew to be true.

A legend circulating the town of Saint-Pol holds that one night in 1823, an old peasant heard the sounds of two horses galloping at frightening speed on the road past her cottage, one in pursuit of the other. If the stories are to be believed, she heard a shot ring out in the night, the panicked whinny of a rearing horse, and the thud of a body hitting the ground; moments later, the countryside lit up with a golden light as bright as the sun, whereupon the poor woman fainted in terror.

Inspector Javert, who of all the people involved ought to have the most to tell, is notoriously taciturn on the subject. Just once, he was heard to mutter, “The shot may have missed, but I could swear the old devil broke his neck in the fall.”


	8. Doctor Who Crossover Fragments

The creatures were advancing on them. “Run,” he whispered and held out his hand, and suddenly Cosette was eight years old again. The world was vast beyond imagination and filled with monsters, but an unexpected hand was reaching out to her in the darkness, and the burden was lighter with two.

They ran.

-

“That’s the thing about the stars. They only seem like fixed points of light because you’re looking at them from so very, very far off. If you look any closer, or if you investigate those bothersome little irregularities and exceptions that prove the rules, that’s when you discover that every star is a sun, and that every sun is a flaming tempest perpetually at war with itself. And if you think we’re living in some clockwork universe fixed in its course, or that the stars can’t falter or implode in on themselves until an entire solar system is collapsed to the size of a human skull… oh, Horatio, there are so many more things in heaven and earth. We haven’t even started.”

-

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?” said Cosette when it was all over. “To be forgiven.”

The Doctor didn’t answer, and Cosette’s white-haired, sharp-eyed old father looked up. For the first time since they’d returned and he’d almost collapsed with relief to learn that his child hadn’t been led to her death or worse by the strange man in the garden, he spoke: “Don’t we all?”

-

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” said the Doctor as he emerged from the café, “that is just going too far.”

“It says police box,” said Gavroche cheerfully, “which means property of the government, which means property of the Republic. Thanks for doing your part, citizen!”

There was an alarming sloshing noise as half a dozen brawny men tipped the TARDIS over slantwise into the growing pile of rubble. “Pardieu, mate,” Gavroche continued, “what’ve you got in there, the Canal St-Martin?”

“It’s a swimming pool,” the Doctor answered petulantly, “and right now it sounds like a swimming pool filled with half my books and my two favorite cozy chairs.”

“Your two favorite cozy chairs? Why didn’t you tell me? I’ll fish them out for you, posthaste!” And before anyone could stop him, Gavroche had wriggled through the unlocked TARDIS doors and cannonballed with an almighty splash into the swimming pool below. “There they are!” he shouted. “You lot, give me a hand! More furniture for the Republic!”


	9. Tropefic prompt #1: Bahorel, Accidental baby acquisition

"Well, I never!" cried Mme Downstairs (the neighbors were usually too good at avoiding him for him to know their names) at the sight of Bahorel looming in her doorway, her infant son sound asleep in his arms. "Just look at you, young man, one would think you’d been a father for years! It just goes to show, doesn’t it, you can’t listen to gossip, oh, the things the other tenants have told me about you—"

"It was no trouble watching him," said Bahorel, fidgeting sheepishly on the threshold and watching for an opportunity to hand off the baby. "You learn how to deal with kids when you’ve got five younger sisters back home. And besides, he’s a fine fellow."

Mme Downstairs wasn’t even listening. “—and to think, when Jean-Pierre told me who he’d found to watch the baby this afternoon I almost died of fright, they say he’s one of those bouzingot ruffians, I told him, they mutter about conspirators and Carbonari and naked dinner-parties and Satanic rituals, and the poor porteress had her cat disappear on her last Wednesday you know, I thought we would never see the child again, or that he’d be exposed to such debauchery, oh, Monsieur, they said you were at the premiere of Hernani, those wretched tongue-wagging shrews! But look at you with him sleeping so peacefully, and him normally so fussy, I don’t know how you did it—”

Bahorel, for all his reckless courage when confronted with a battle, was taken aback by such an onslaught. He ‘hmm’ed and nodded and cast about in vain for a means of escape, hoping all the while that Mme Downstairs wouldn’t scent the secret of his success above the strong odor of overcooked cabbage that hung about the building.

"It was my pleasure," he cut in as soon as she stopped for breath. He thrust the baby into her arms, gave the lad a final pat on the head, and bolted.

Back in his room, he breathed a sigh of relief, and pulled the absinthe-soaked handkerchief he’d been using as a teething rag out of his pocket to toss it on the laundry pile. The trick was to start them young.


	10. Tropefic prompt #2: Joly, Jean Prouvaire, Road trip

**A godforsaken road somewhere outside Leeds, 1982**

"Consider it a forced exercise in serendipity," said Jean Prouvaire dreamily. Joly snorted and kicked the car to see if that would get it to start again. It didn’t.

"It won’t work. It’s a sign. Let us abandon ourselves to the hand of Fate and see where her caprices lead us." Prouvaire readjusted his aviators and struck out over the wild moonlit moors, or at least made it as far as the nearest hedgerow, which he plowed into at full tilt and found himself unable to plow back out of, since his fishnet shirt was caught in the foliage.

"Oh for _Christ’s_ sake Jean, you aren’t actually a vampire and you can’t actually see in the dark, especially with those ridiculous shades on,” Joly grumbled, letting his wrench clatter to the ground and hurrying over to help his friend disentangle himself. “You should get out in the sun sometimes, it’s good for you,” he continued, perking up as he found an excuse to chatter about his current favorite topic. “The electromagnetic energy gets captured in the molecules of alcohol and forms a base for all sorts of homeopathic remedies. I went to a lecture about it last week. The professor said that’s why sunlight hurts when you’re hungover. Like antiseptic stinging on a cut.”

"Shut up about your quack professor, I’m being eaten by a fucking Ent!"

"A _what_?” With a great ripping of fishnets, Joly yanked one of Prouvaire’s arms free of the hedge.

"One of those fucking Tolkien tree things, I thought I made you all read Lord of the Rings when I was learning Welsh, no wait Joly not yet let me get my feet under m—"

They crashed to the wet grass in a tangle of fishnets and cursing. “I gave up at Tom Bombadil,” Joly confessed when he got his breath back. They looked at each other and burst into uncontrollable giggles.

"All right, tell me, how many drugs are you even on?" said Joly, still wheezing with laughter.

"Don’t remember. Took a lot of stuff at the concert. Is my lipstick smudged?"

Joly peered at him. “Probably. Can’t tell you from Robert Smith in this light. But don’t listen to me, I can’t tell Robert Smith from Siouxsie Sioux even in broad daylight. C’mon, let’s get back to the car.”

"Why’re you in such a hurry anyway?" Prouvaire muttered, but let Joly drag him back to the road by one fashionably-tattered sleeve. "Is the anthroposophical-medicine lady back in town?"

Joly shook his head, some measure of gravity returning to his face. “Enjolras wants us. He got Bossuet to call me even though nobody was supposed to know we were staying with the Cougourde. Didn’t you hear about the _Belgrano?_   Shit’s getting serious, Jean.”

"Jehan."

"Right, right, Jehan. What is that anyway? Some kind of pretentious literary reference?"


End file.
